On the occasion of Berlin Art Week, Galerie Barbara Thumm is pleased to present Profondeville, the first solo exhibition by Berlin-based artist Thomas Zipp (b. 1966, Heppenheim, Germany) at the gallery. This exhibition marks a milestone in our ongoing collaboration with the artist and follows his participation in the group exhibition “Anti-Pop II,” which we co-curated and through which we first introduced Zipp’s work to our program.

Thomas Zipp, widely known for his intellectually demanding, multidisciplinary approach, has been a central figure in contemporary art in Germany and beyond since the late 1990s. His oeuvre encompasses drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and performance, consistently engaging with complex historical narratives, speculative knowledge systems, and psychological architectures.

In Profondeville, Zipp unveils an impressive ensemble of works that deepens his engagement with the intertwined fields of memory, identity, and perception. The house—both as architectural structure and as metaphor—runs as a leitmotif throughout the exhibition: not only as psychological interior, but as a permeable space in which the boundaries of self, history, and consciousness become fluid. Echoing Freud’s observation that one is no longer master in one’s own house, Zipp’s spatial installations operate like cognitive maps: fragmented, unstable, and permeated by hidden forces.

The exhibition title Profondeville refers to a small Belgian town that became known in the second half of the 20th century for documented UFO sightings. Thomas Zipp has been engaging with these Belgian UFO sightings and their reflections for more than a decade. Here, the place name becomes a poetic resonance space, a symbolic threshold between visible and invisible worlds. This notion gains new urgency in light of recent, unexplained aerial phenomena traversing our Milky Way that elude astrophysical interpretation. In this context, Profondeville refers to quantum states of superposition, in which multiple realities exist simultaneously until they are determined by observation. As long as their origin remains unmeasured, these phenomena appear as possible signs of extraterrestrial intelligence — a cosmic window for reimagining what is real, what is remembered, and what might yet be believed.